Presidential debate is not just a show

Since homo sapiens emerged on the Savannah Plain some 200,000 years ago, we have displayed certain survival characteristics, including an instinct to fight when threatened. That's probably why we're fascinated by conflict — the force that propels every story, as any novelist or screenwriter or (ahem) journalist can tell you.

You can see the conflict imperative in our political leaders who, after all, certainly haven't evolved any more fully than the rest of us. Candidates survive if they emerge triumphant from conflict, which means that the most successful politicians tend to be those who fight best.

So maybe we shouldn't be too hard on the television producers and network executives who contrived the two nights of presidential candidate debates this week. They had a ready-made story line — Democrats search for a champion to take on Donald Trump! — that required showcasing the differences among a big cast of characters. And if you put 20 politicians on a stage over four-plus hours, all of them knowing that some will surely survive or die as candidates based on their performance, you'll inevitably get some WWE Smackdown moments.

Still, and with all due respect to well-intentioned and hardworking television journalists, nobody should be satisfied by the debates produced this week by CNN, nor those NBC aired last month. The shows — make no mistake, that's what they were — underscored not only the limitations of the televised debate formats that we've come to expect, but also the sense candidates have developed of what it takes to get the attention of voters nowadays.

Think for a moment about what the purpose of the debate should be. Surely it is to help voters decide which candidate might make the best president — or, if the viewer is a committed Democrat, which candidate has the best chance of getting Trump out of the White House.

It's hard to imagine that those goals were at the forefront of the minds of the people who put together the debate programs we've seen so far. In the rapid-fire format — one minute for a candidate to answer a direct question, 30 seconds for another candidate to respond — the networks spoke to the short attention span of today's audiences. And in the way the network moderators handled the questioning, it seemed as though the main goal was to get the candidates to fight each other.

Nor did the moderators' choice of topics help dissuade us from the notion that their goal was mainly to make a good TV show. You didn't hear a discussion this week of the threat to our democracy posed by Russian election meddling or the gerrymandering that the Supreme Court now says it can't stop. There wasn't a question about the national security peril presented by either North Korea or Iran, or about what a Democratic president might do about states that have defied Roe v. Wade by enacting abortion restrictions.

No wonder candidates prepared for the debates by polishing their one-liners, especially those that would please the partisan live audiences that applauded, cheered and hooted at what they liked.

"I'm tired of Democrats being afraid of big ideas," Bernie Sanders said at one point, a nine-word summation of his campaign.

"What I don't like about this," Amy Kloubuchar countered, defending her more moderate stance, "is we are talking more about winning an argument than winning an election."

And, of course, nobody will soon forget Kirsten Gillibrand's almost offhand humor: "So the first thing I'm going to do when I'm president is, I'm going to Clorox the Oval Office." (Second thing, FYI: "I will re-engage on global climate change.")

We're all susceptible to these quick, clever lines. Guilty plea: I'm quoting them here, rather than devoting this column to the arcane differences among the candidates' health care ideas.

Of course, there are many forums other than debates that let voters assess the candidates. And to the cable channels' credit, they're featuring many candidates in town hall programs, at which voters can grill the contenders in greater depth, and on issues they really care about.

But there's a place, surely, somewhere between the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates (21 hours over seven sessions) and candidates in 2019 being told to stick up their hands to show support for simplistic statements on complex policy matters.

Yet we know the debate producers are only responding to the reality of this electorate: We lap up vague promises and emotional appeals; we're entranced by conflict and drawn to candidates who project themselves as winners. If this sounds too much like a presidential race of recent vintage, you must agree, then, that we're really all to blame.